Synchronicity: How Good Things Happen

Ever turned back to look at your life and realized that where you stand today is a result of meaningful coincidences? Back in 1920s Carl Jung came up with the term Synchronicity to describe “events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.”

Ever looked at the synchronicity in your life? Here’s a look at some of mine.

I have a degree in architecture, largely unused, because I switched careers soon after I started working. So it was a waste, you might ask? No. During my five years of pursuing my degree in architecture, I made lifelong friends, and also came face to face with who I really was, for the first time in my life. That was value enough for me.

But 16 years later after I graduated, I would meet a person who would give direction to how I thought about myself and entrepreneurship. I met Darshan in 2011, when I joined his program on entrepreneurship. How did I come to meet him? Through my Architecture classmate (and lifelong friend), Virender.

And sometime in 2012, I remember sitting at a self development workshop Darshan was leading (and I was finding phenomenal value in), and telling him, “This is why I had to do Architecture. So I could meet you!” He smiled.

Meeting Darshan was the start of many synchronicities in my entrepreneurship life. I was at an IT SME event, in 2012. During one of the sessions I attended, I heard a person from the audience ask a question. What he asked, and how he articulated it, drew me to him. And I ended up exchanging cards with him that day. That was Rahul, the founder of an open source IT services company. He went on to be coached by Darshan and take his company to new levels of growth.

Rahul and I kept in touch, exchanging leads for each other’s businesses. Rahul was really interested in what I was trying to do (and had empathy for my entrepreneurship distress) and soon hired us for content development for his website.

This is where things turn interesting.

Darshan invited me to the launch of his new program for startups. At the launch, I listened to the startup founders talk about their companies and what they were trying to do. I particularly remember a youngster talking of heat maps and engagement rates, and his previous startup failures. I thought nothing of it.

But synchronicity wasn’t about to let go.

I ran into him again at a networking event. We ended up chatting for a long time that day over tea and snacks. That day I probably got to know his startup was being incubated by none other than Rahul.

Still I thought nothing of it.

One thing led to another. And one fine day, Rahul figured he was having the same type of conversations with me, as well as his incubatee. He said, why don’t you two collaborate and come to me with a single pitch?

And that’s how Abhinav and I started working together. Many collaborative pitches later, we merged our companies, because we realized it would create phenomenal value for our customers.

Today, we are building, not one, not two, but three brands, along with Dhiraj, who joined us later as a co-founder for our product.

Synchronicity!

Here’s another stream of meaningful coincidences.

Both Abhinav and I had adopted our way of doing marketing to align with the principles of Inbound Marketing, made popular by HubSpot. In 2013, when we merged, we had pipe dreams of being the HubSpot of India, not really knowing what it even meant.

In 2015, as the largest inbound marketing event on the planet, INBOUND15 opened in Boston, a handful of us stayed up nights curating content around it. Through the next four days we created content based on the sessions being tweeted about and Periscoped. And before the event was over, we had over 20 blog posts live.

Our intention was to be able to report live on the event, so inbound marketing professionals who were not in Boston could find content on INBOUND15. Nothing beyond that. There’s a sense of community and giving which is inherent to inbound marketing. We were just practising that. And we really had no Call to Action for all that content. Not till Abhinav realized we had hit pay dirt (3X our normal traffic from the US), and overnight our white labeling services page went live.

And as always, we didn’t think too much about it. Till a few months later, when we thought it might be a new business opportunity waiting to be tapped. And that’s how we landed up at INBOUND16, trying to talk to US inbound marketing agencies, if they would be willing to outsource to us. YES! Said many.

But it was a serendipitous meeting with Douglas Burdett who runs the Marketing Book Podcast, that would change things for us. He was generous with his advice, and connected us to a company who had tried white labeling and then closed it down. We ended up speaking to one of the co-founders, who too was generous with her advice. We likely shortened our learning cycle by many months, if not years, because of that call with her. At the next INBOUND, we ended up meeting her and her partner, and soon after they became our client!

Synchronicity.

Today we are HubSpot partners, and we have multiple white labeling clients across the world. All because we thought it would be cool to virtually cover INBOUND two and a half years ago! Meaningless back then. Now it is feels like a meaningful coincidence. We are not the “HubSpot of India”, but we are among the only two tiered partners in the country. And we are building our own content marketing tool, so we may not be way off. Who knows!